So I am writing a Backbone.js application.
I have opted to use the MVP pattern with Passive Views.
Now my arch so far is:
Application
Page Presenter
Layout View
Header Presenter
Layout View
Logo View
User View
Content Presenter
Layout View
Footer Presenter
Layout View
Now I am very new to the concept of MVP (had a lot of experience with MVC).
So say I want to render the header's layout and then attach it to the Page Presenter's layout view, who's responsibility is it to do so?
Most often, I see simple HTML/Image elements contained in a view template that is brought in via Handlebars, Underscore templating, or the like to the view. This allows you to keep your javascript and html separated. Absent that, HTML would live directly in the view.
The examples in this article make a common pattern for templates in MVP pretty clear.
I prefer to go one step further in my apps, starting with a common template in index for things like logos, main page layout, etc....then drawing my views in an element of that common template assisted by specialized, smaller, templates-per-view that contain specific html content to make the view work. The downside is that some template-per-views can be empty files, but that is a very rare occurance. It's also quite clear to the rest of the team where an element is going to be if they need to edit it.
Related
I am trying to learn and understand the capabilities of UI-router with Angular 1.3.15.
I am trying to set up an application which has many views that have a header and footer directive. It also has a smaller number of views that do not need this setup, with the loaded view taking up the entire page.
Therefore, it seems I should handle this divergence "one level down", as in my diagram below. In the past, I have worked on ui-router apps with the index.html coded with the header/footer directives and a single ui-view for the other pages to load into. This time I am trying to get it correct form the start. Opinions and advice welcome.
I'm not sure what you want to know.
Yeah, you should handle the difference in templates the way you suggested: the root template should contain only the elements which appear on all states. Elements which appear on some states should go on those states templates, in the template of a parent state (if it makes sense), or in directives that you reuse in the various templates.
Instead of directives, you might want to use named views if your templates have some peatures in common, but the differences between them are not inside a single DOM element. For example, maybe all your pages have a small toolbar on top that always has some buttons, but other buttons depend on the state you are in. You can place that constant part of the toolbar in the root template, together with a <div ui-view="toolbar"></div>. The states would then define a view named toolbar with a template with the buttons they want to add.
You could make a directive for that toolbar with all the global buttons in its template and use <ng-transclude> to add the custom buttons at each state's template, but using named views seems cleaner.
I have a huge form divided into sections. It has about eight sections and it will simply be unwieldy to put this giant form on one page. No one would ever slog through it.
I also decided that dividing it into pages will also not be ideal because if someone is section 6 and realizes he needs to change something on section 2.
I created a client side solution using Jquery. So You just click tabs representing sections of the form. So you hide a previous section section when you click on a new section and handle all the logic of saving server side making sure someone can switch back and forth while validating data on each section. Behind the scenes its still one huge form. A lot of Jquery is used to make it work properly. It is tightly coupled to the DOM and no one can understand the code unless I explain.
Also when making changes you have to make sure there are no lingering events which cause something unexpected to affect another section of the code.
Its quickly becoming a monster. I think this is an ideal problem a Javascript framework would solve but I have no idea where to start. How would it fit in the context of Javascript MVC especially all the DOM manipulation and event driven approach I use. any ideas or suggestions are welcome.
I would consider using AngularJS
This is a real war story - I was struggling with the exact same issue you are. Huge unwieldy form, needed it to be refactored into re-usable components(since one portion of the form included a pricing page).
Getting started is pretty easy, I'd suggest to look at the tutorial before you see my solution.
Here's how I solved my issue -
Have one controller for your form.
Use UI-router for making sub-routes of your form (e.g. /signup/profile, /signup/address etc); all of them being controlled by your main controller. Store them in separate HTML files as templates being rendered on a view (yay!)
Also, you don't need a major commitment to use angular, you can just use it for this purpose in your app.
Hope this helps.
Frameworks that handle data binding and embedded control statements sound like they would be ideal for an issue like this, like Knockout.js or Angular.js.
For example, with knockout, you could have a segment like:
<div data-bind="if: someCondition">
Only show this section of the form if the condition is met
....
</div>
Our SPA has 2 distinctive top level views. To compare it is like windows file explorer showing tree view on one side and content details on other side. For these top level views, we are considering to have 2 partial views. Other alternative is to pack these views as directives. Our initial thoughts are going toward partial views, because these are quite larger blocks of functionalties and each view can have multiple controllers. Any experience/thoughts on similar lines would help us decide. Just a note we communicate between these views using eventing mechanism.
We do not intend to reuses these views. Specifically, are there any issues going partial views? Like performance, maintainability, etc.
I'm not sure I'm understanding the problem here, so sorry if I say something wrong (also sorry for my english).
What you need are 2 views; if 'inside' those views you use a directive or not, it's another thing.
The only thing I'm pretty sure is that those 2 views need to have they're own scope.
To me it seems a lot like a 'navigation menu' vs. 'view' kind of problem (only that the navigation part is gonna be some sort of tree-view), so the solution should be similar:
the 'normal' ngView (your 'details' side);
a div with it's own controller (and it's own scope).
Something like:
<nav ng-controller="treeViewController()">
<!-- here we use a directive, for example -->
<tree-view ng-model="tree"></tree-view>
</nav>
<div ng-view></div>
Then the best way to make them communicate is probably a custom service.
In case I misunderstood your problem, sorry in advance.
I am using a master page having navigation and ng-view on it, partial pages loading successfully under ng-view and with navigation of master page , but I require to load some isolated page like login.html page but not under ng-view and without master page content during route.
I am new on angular and not sure how to do this, login page loaded every time under ng-view.
Please suggest me any way to do this.
Thanks in advanced.
ng-include is your friend. see doc
here is simple way, but you should go to doc and see that there are extra options as to what can be done onload and if you want to autoscroll or do some kind of animation.
<div ng-include="'somefile.html'">
</div>
The one extra note is that ng-include is given an expression so if you have a static reference you need the extra quotes.
One of the great things about Angular is it is very flexible. Ultimately it will depend on your app and how you work. I'm not exactly certain what you are trying to accomplish but, it sounds like a job for the ngInclude directive as Dan mentioned.
You mention a login.html that excludes navigational and other main page content. Using a modal may be a viable alternative interface decision.
If you have everything built and you only want to hide part of the DOM and be done with it then, nghide or ngShow may be the quickest solution.
If there is a lot of stuff on your index.html you may want to separate those things into partials other than the ones connected directly to your routes, and use ng-include="'path/to/partial.html'" to include them. (The "''" are intentional as it likes a string.) Read the docs and experiment with the plunkr. You can do a lot of cool things with ngInclude, especially if you pay attention to its context.
If you combine the ngInclude directive with ng-switch-when, you could put together something like:
<div ng-switch="routeAction">
<div ng-switch-when="extpage" ng-include="'extraneous.content.html'"></div>
<div ng-switch-when="login" ng-include="'login.partial.html'"></div>
<div ng-switch-default ng-include="'default.tpl.html'"></div>
</div>
Where routeAction is tied to your controler which, is tied to your $route or $location.. depending on how you have things set up.
My web application, written in Backbone.js, has what I call a number of "Modes".
Each mode describes which models and views that are currently active. By changing the mode parameter in the hash (#) I switch between modes and instantiate necessary Backbone models & views.
It seems logical to also describe the preferred layout and inject the container html code on a mode level.
Let's say the mode "PopulationPyramidMode" has a model and 3 Backbone views. The "HeaderView" should take up 30 pixels vertically. The "SidebarView" should take up 200 pixels horizontally and the "CanvasView" should fill moist of the screen and scale on resize events.
To complicate things further, the CanvasView holds a visualization which must be re-rendered on resize, i.e. the x/y-scales must be re-calculated.
So, what is the best approach to this?
1) Where should the layout logic go?
- On a separate layoutManager - and in that case how?
- Should each view describe its preferred size etc?
2) How do I inject the necessary HTML/CSS for my layouts and switch between them?
<!-- Layout 1 -->
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="sidebar"></div>
<div id="canvas"></div>
<!-- Layout 2 -->
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="canvas"></div>
Thanks for any specific hints and also on JavaScript layouts in general!
Just thinking out loud here. It sounds like you could have one view which manages the layout, but is capable of morphing the layout as needed. The question is: what triggers the layout change?
You might have a controller which is equipped with the routes and actions for these different modes. This controller could either hold an instance to this layout view and call a parameterized refresh function. Alternatively, the controller could trigger an event with the mode change and the view could be set up to listen for it. Once received, the view would call its refresh function.
My opinion regarding building such applications would be to use the straightforward observer pattern.
Design your controller in a way that it simply dispatches particular events when the hashtag changes. Have an event map in the controller,that acts as a reference table between events to be dispatched and the urls, better still, you can follow a particular convention regarding the choice of hash parts eg. everytime user navigates to url mydomain.com/#part1/part2 the controller dispatches an event 'evt_part1_part2'. You can use a common dispatch point (which can be a dom element, or a javascript object particularly being used for this very purpose).
Now all your views can listen to this common dispatch point, and if the event matches the one that this view is looking for, you can create the respective environment accordingly through that view.
This approach definitely helps in compartmentalization of views, leading of more modular and maintainable code.